Eurasian Steppe

The Eurasian Steppe, also called the Great Steppe or The Steppes, is the vast

The Eurasian Steppe extends for 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) from near the mouth of the Danube in Romania to the western edge of Manchuria. It is bounded on the north by the forests of European Russia and Asian Russia or Siberia. There is no clear southern boundary although the land becomes increasingly dry as one moves south. The steppe narrows at two points, dividing it into three major parts.

Pannonian Steppe (exclave)

The

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  Devínska Kobyla, Bratislava, Slovakia
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  The

  Pannonian steppe in Seewinkel, Austria
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  The

  Pannonian steppe in Devínska Kobyla, Bratislava, Slovakia
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  Danube-Auen National Park, Austria

Pontic–Caspian Steppe (Western Steppe)

The

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  The Pontic–Caspian steppe near Krynychne, Ukraine.
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  The Pontic–Caspian steppe in Henichesk, Ukraine.
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  Steppes in Gagauzia, Moldova.
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  Steppes in Gagauzia, Dezghingea, Moldova.

Ural–Caspian Narrowing

The steppe narrows around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, about 650 km (400 mi) northeast of the Caspian Sea, forming the Ural-Caspian Narrowing, that joins the Pontic-Caspian Steppe in Europe with the Kazakh Steppe in Central Asia.

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  Wooded Ural Mountains of Beloretsky District, Russia
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  Bashkiriya National Park, southern end of the Ural Mountains, Russia
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  Bashkiriya National Park, Ural Mountains, Russia

Kazakh Steppe (Central Steppe)

The

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  The steppe in Akmola Region, Kazakhstan.
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  The steppes in

  Akmola Province, Kazakhstan

  .
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  The Kazakh Steppe in the Ayagoz District, Kazakhstan.
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  The Kazakh Steppe in the early spring.

Dzungarian Narrowing

On the east side of the former Sino-Soviet border, mountains extend north almost to the forest zone separating the Dzungarian Narrowing from the Central Asian steppe, leaving only limited grassland in Dzungaria. This discontinuous section of the Eurasian steppe connects the great steppes of Central Asia and East Asia.

The east-west Tian Shan Mountains divide the steppe into Dzungaria in the north and the Tarim Basin to the south. Dzungaria is bounded by the Tarbagatai Mountains on the west and the Mongolian Altai Mountains on the east, neither of which is a significant barrier. Dzungaria has good grassland around the edges and a central desert. It often behaved as a westward extension of Mongolia and connected Mongolia to the Kazakh Steppe. To the north of Dzungaria are mountains and the Siberian forest. To the south and west of Dzungaria, and separated from it by the Tian Shan mountains, is an area about twice the size of Dzungaria, the oval Tarim Basin. The Tarim Basin's arid conditions make it unsuitable for sustaining a nomadic population. However, along its periphery, rivers descend from the mountains, creating a circle of cities that thrived on irrigation agriculture and engaged in east-west trade. The Tarim Basin formed an island of near civilization in the center of the steppe. The Northern Silk Road went along the north and south sides of the Tarim Basin and then crossed the mountains west to the Fergana Valley. At the west end of the basin the Pamir Mountains connect the Tian Shan Mountains to the Himalayas. To the south, the Kunlun Mountains separate the Tarim Basin from the thinly peopled Tibetan Plateau.

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  Tuva Republic, Russia

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  Dus-Khol lake,

  Tuva Republic, Russia

  .
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  The grassland in

  Tuva Republic, Russia

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  Dus-Khol lake,

  Tuva Republic, Russia

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South of the Khingan Mountains and north of the Taihang Mountains, the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe extends east into Manchuria as the Liao Xi steppe. In Manchuria, the steppe grades off into forest and mountains without reaching the Pacific. The central area of forest-steppe was inhabited by pastoral and agricultural peoples, while to the north and east was a thin population of hunting tribes of the Siberian type.

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  The Daurian forest steppe
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  The Mongolian-Manchurian grassland in the Khövsgöl Province, Mongolia.
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  Grass steppe in the Khövsgöl Province, Mongolia.
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  Daursky Nature Reserve in the southern part of the Zabaykalsky Krai in Siberia, Russia, close to the border with Mongolia.
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  The Mongolian-Manchurian grassland in Inner Mongolia, China.

Fauna

Big mammals of the Eurasian steppe were the

Furthermore, the Eurasian steppe is home to a great variety of bird species. Threatened bird species living there are for example the imperial eagle, the lesser kestrel, the great bustard, the pale-back pigeon and the white-throated bushchat.^[15]

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  Przewalski horse
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  Corsac fox
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  Saiga antelope
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  Onager

The primary domesticated animals raised were sheep and goats with fewer cattle than one might expect. Camels were used in the drier areas for transport as far west as Astrakhan. There were some yaks along the edge of Tibet. The horse was used for transportation and warfare. The horse was first domesticated on the Pontic–Caspian or Kazakh steppe sometime before 3000 BC, but it took a long time for mounted archery to develop and the process is not fully understood. The stirrup does not seem to have been completely developed until 300 AD (see Stirrup, Saddle, Composite bow, Domestication of the horse and related articles).

Ecoregions

The World Wide Fund for Nature divides the Eurasian steppe's temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands into a number of ecoregions, distinguished by elevation, climate, rainfall, and other characteristics and home to distinct animal and plant communities and species and distinct habitat ecosystems.

Human activities

Trade habits

The major centers of population and high culture in Eurasia are Europe, the Middle East, India and China. For some purposes it is useful to treat Greater Iran as a separate region. All these regions are connected directly or indirectly by the Eurasian Steppe route which was an active predecessor of the Silk Road. The latter started in the Guanzhong region of China and ran west along the Hexi Corridor to the Tarim Basin. From there it went southwest to Greater Iran and turned southeast to India or west to the Middle East and Europe. A minor branch went northwest along the great rivers and north of the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. When faced with a rich caravan the steppe nomads could either rob it, or tax it, or hire themselves out as guards. Economically, these three forms of taxation or parasitism amounted to the same thing. Trade was usually most vigorous when a strong empire controlled the steppe and reduced the number of petty chieftains preying on trade. The silk road first became significant and Chinese silk began reaching the Roman Empire about the time that the Emperor of Han pushed Chinese power west to the Tarim Basin.

Agriculture

The nomads would occasionally tolerate colonies of peasants on the steppe in the few areas where farming was possible. These were often captives who grew grain for their nomadic masters. Along the fringes there were areas that could be used for either plowland or grassland. These alternated between one and the other depending on the relative strength of the nomadic and agrarian heartlands. Over the last few hundred years, the Russian steppe and much of Inner Mongolia has been cultivated. The fact that most of the Russian steppe is not irrigated implies that it was maintained as grasslands as a result of the military strength of the nomads.

Language

According to the most widely held hypothesis of the origin of the

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Warfare

Along the northern fringe of the Eurasian steppe, nomads would collect tribute from and blend with the forest tribes (see Khanate of Sibir, Buryats).^{[citation needed]} Russia paid tribute (compare yasak) to the Golden Horde^[17] from about 1240 to 1480.^[18] South of the Kazakh steppe the nomads blended with the sedentary population, partly because the Middle East has significant areas of steppe (taken by force in past invasions) and pastoralism. There was a sharp cultural divide between Mongolia and China and almost constant warfare from the dawn of history until the Qing conquest of Dzungaria in 1757.^{[citation needed]} The nomads collected large amounts of tribute from the Chinese and several Chinese dynasties were of steppe origin. Perhaps because of the mixture of agriculture and pastoralism in Manchuria its inhabitants, the Manchu knew how to deal with both nomads and the settled populations and therefore were able to conquer much of northern China^[when?] when both Chinese and Mongols were weak.^{[original research?]}

Legacy of the Eurasian steppe's nomads

The steppe culture of Russia was shaped in Russia through cross-cultural contact mostly by Slavic, Tatar-Turkic, Mongolian and Iranian people.^{[19][20][need quotation to verify]} Rus' rulers would ally themselves by marriage with fellow-steppe peoples.^[21] In addition to ethnicity, also instruments such as the

• Eurasian nomads
• Great Hungarian Plain
• Izyum Trail
• Little Hungarian Plain
• Steppe Route

References

Bibliography

• Barthold, W. (1992). Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion. Translated by Minorsky, T. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.
• Christian, David (1998). A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. Vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Blackwell Publishing.
• Fletcher, Joseph F. (1995). "The Mongols: ecological and social perspectives". In Forbes Manz, Beatrice (ed.). Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia. Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum.
• Grousset, René (1970). The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. Translated by Walford, Naomi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• John of Plano Carpini (2005). "History of the Mongols". In Dawson, Christopher (ed.). Mission to Asia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 3–76.
• Krader, Lawrence (1955). "Ecology of Central Asian Pastoralism". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 11 (4): 301–326.
  S2CID 130062187
  .
• Lattimore, Owen (1962). "The Geographical Factor in Mongol History". In Lattimore, Owen (ed.). Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928–1958. London: Oxford University Press. pp. 241–258.
• ISBN 978-0-86078-632-0
  .
• Sinor, Denis (1977). "Horse and Pasture in Inner Asian History". In Sinor, Denis (ed.). Inner Asia and its Contacts with Medieval Europe. Collected Studies Series. London: Variorum.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eurasian Steppe.

• "The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of international relations" in Journal of International Relations and Development